Beyond Cladistics

The Branching of a Paradigm

David M. Williams

Publication Year: 2010

Cladistics, or phylogenetic systematics—an approach to discovering, unraveling, and testing hypotheses of evolutionary history—took hold during a turbulent and acrimonious time in the history of systematics. During this period—the 1960s and 1970s—much of the foundation of modern systematic methodology was established as cladistic approaches became widely accepted. Virtually complete by the end of the 1980s, the wide perception has been that little has changed. This volume vividly illustrates that cladistic methodologies have continued to be developed, improved upon, and effectively used in ever widening analytically imaginative ways.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Contributors

Preface

This book represents an attempt to document the nature and anticipate
the future of cladistics. Inspired by the career and contributions of Chris
Humphries, recently retired and now deceased botanist of the Natural
History Museum (London), the breadth and depth of this one transformative
career reflects decades of scientific advancement ...

Part One: On Chris

Bibliography of Works by Chris Humphries

1. Chris Humphries, Cladistics, and Connections

By way of introduction, we offer this short piece describing a few subjects
that attracted Chris Humphries’s attention during his thirty-plus
years as botanist and systematist. While it is impossible to cover all the
subjects with which Chris was involved, we have selected a few that
seem representative of his breadth: ...

It is a distinct pleasure to be invited to contribute to this Festschrift for
Chris Humphries, which provides an opportunity to reflect on how much
has changed in systematic biology since the 1970s. At that time, Chris
and one of us (S.B.) were research students in the Compositae systematics
group established by Vernon Heywood ...

3. Rooted in Cladistics: Chris Humphries, Conservation—and Beyond?

The various contributions that Chris Humphries made to the biodiversity
conservation movement during the early 1990s were literally and
severally “rooted in cladistics”—and my purpose here is to give some
flavor of that. However, I also wish to make a personal reflection on the
“beyond”—the holistic approach to life— ...

4. Do We Need to Describe, Name, and Classify All Species?

Rutherford was more candid about his bias than most experimental
biologists are in sharing their view of taxonomy (see quotation). To the
outsider, taxonomy may look a bit like philately. We do want to collect
every species, but the similarity stops there. Our motive is to explore
unique characters and all their subsequent modifications ...

5. Floras to Phylogenies: Why Descriptive Taxonomy Matters

The centrality of taxonomy (or systematics; we will here use these two
terms as synonymous) to the study of diversity is often taken for granted,
but the decline in the discipline decline has been highlighted through various
reports (House of Lords 1992, 2002, 2008) and funding initiatives ...

Part Two: Botany

6. Island Hot Spots: The Challenge of Climate Change

Biodiversity hot spots hold especially high numbers of endemic species,
yet their combined area of remaining habitat covers only 2.3 percent of
the Earth’s land surface. Each hot spot faces extreme threats and has
already lost at least 70 percent of its original natural vegetation. ...

7. Endemism and Evolution of the Macaronesian Flora

The Macaronesian region (Fig. 7.1) comprises the volcanic oceanic archipelagos
of the Azores, Madeira, Salvages, Canary Islands, and Cape
Verdes located in the North Atlantic Ocean. The flora of the region
demonstrate many characteristics typical of oceanic archipelago floras,
notably a high degree of endemism, ...

8. Early British Collectors and Observers of the Macaronesian Flora: From Sloane to Darwin

Although the four northern Macaronesian archipelagos of the Azores,
Canaries, Salvages, and Madeira are located relatively close to the
European mainland, they have many endemic species that are morphologically
very different from those found on the mainland. These islands
were therefore an early place of interaction ...

Part Three: Cladistics

9. Monophyly and the Two Hierarchies

The school of biological systematics known as cladistics is notorious for
drawing a distinction between pattern and process (Nelson and Platnick
1981; Beatty 1982). The pattern is one of relative degrees of relationships,
the process is one of species lineages splitting and splitting again.
A cladogram potentially has two interpretations (Platnick 1977). ...

10. Beyond Belief: The Steady Resurrection of Phenetics

Nowadays phenetics per se is rarely taught in systematics courses, its
heyday during the 1960s supposedly having come and gone. For example,
botanist Richard Jensen, reviewing the Twenty-fifth Numerical
Taxonomy Conference held at the University of Pittsburgh sixteen years
ago, made the following comments: ...

11. Monographic Effects on the Stratigraphic Distribution of Brachiopods

More than 220 years of taxonomic research have resulted in the description
of over five thousand different genera of Brachiopoda. The phylum
is predominantly known as fossils, but over a hundred genera still live
in today’s oceans. Arguably therefore, brachiopod classification is more
complicated than for many phyla ...

12. The Eukaryote Tree of Life

By the early 1990s, it was becoming clear that the commonly used five
kingdom classification schemes were oversimplified and simply inadequate
for describing the major divisions of life. At this critical point in
time, when morphological data from electron microscopy was beginning
to be supplemented with information from DNA sequences, ...

Part Four: Biogeography

13. Tethys and Teleosts

The title of this volume, Beyond Cladistics, is somewhat enigmatic as it
may imply preference for systematic methodologies that are outside the
traditional practices of cladistics, such as maximum likelihood or Bayesian
analysis. It may also imply that there are deep methodological issues
within the cladistic realm that remain to be resolved, ...

The eucalypt group (Myrtaceae) totals seven genera, including small rain
forest genera, and species-rich sclerophyll genera that dominate Australian
vegetation (Ladiges et al. 2003). Living taxa occur throughout
Australia but extend to New Caledonia, New Guinea, and Malesia (to
the southern Philippines; Williams and Brooker 1997). ...

15. Wallacea Deconstructed

A triangular-shaped area in the middle of the Indo-Australian Archipelago
was delimited by Roy Ernest Dickerson and colleagues (1928)
in a collaborative volume on the distribution of plants and animals of
the Philippine Archipelago: “We might compare Wallacea to a narrow-based,
elongated triangle lying between Sundaland and Papualand, ...

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